Comment by crooy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crooy | Hacker News Reader

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The Github enterprise version is unrealistically expensive.

We (a dutch 'embedded' software company of about 300 developers) currently use SVN for our version control. We use some tool, of which I forgot the name, to simplify managing repositories and permissions. This costs us a couple of hours per year in maintenance and support, and the tool cost somewhere around 1500 euro. Hours go for around 80 euro's here, so lets say 3.000 euro TCO per year.

For us having code in the cloud (read within reach of the US government) is not an option, our customers will not allow it. I believe our insurance will not even allow that. Also we need to have Ldap/Active Directory integration; Ldap is the only way we can effectively manage authorisation between a large amount of services.

Looking at all the alternatives, Atlassian Stash, Gitstack, etc. Github is by far the most expensive(75.000 per year). Right now, we have decided that setting up a Gitblit server ourselves, will be the most cost effective.

There is no way I can convince my boss that using Github will save us 60.000 euro per year.

I'd imagine that with 300 developers, a good fraction of them already use git and github for their own projects, and so they would be comfortable with using the interface. Not that SVN is a bad choice -- depending on your company's workflow, familiarity with git and the need for more localized version tracking there are tradeoffs in either solution.

However, even if you're counting 60.000 euro per year, it's not really such a large number when you consider that you have 300 developers. Saving on average 7~ hours per developer per year in work efficiency would more than make up for the fees, but the costs of switching over and perhaps picking up a new version control is also something to consider.

When I learned about GitHub Enterprise I was very happy thinking that we can finally switch to Git (currently we use SVN) only to be saddened by their pricing. We have around 5000 employees, GitHub price for 500 seats is 125,000$, this is incredibly expensive. Judging by their pricing they don't want big companies to be their clients as simple as that. Atlassian for example had a lot of grief with us simply because their products didn't scale that well past 5000 users.

Have you thought about contacting them and asking for a discount for volume?

Their enterprise pricing is probably designed for under a 100 employees.

No one is going to make you commit to a contract or bite your hand off if you ask them if they can go cheaper.

I doubt that they will cut the price to 100,000$. Why 100k$ because that's more than we pay for ALL Atlassian tools taken together. GitHub just does not provide that much value to cost that much.

You may be surprised and you won't know until you ask.

Where do you think the largest cost in an app like this comes from? Especially the onsite installed version? It's in support of the users.

Just name your budget to them and see if they meet it or not. Simple as a couple of emails. Maybe it could be $40k for 500 users… who knows?

Fair enough. So far we decided to stick to SVN, I might contact them in a couple years. Who knows maybe by then it will be cheaper.

> Where do you think the largest cost in an app like this comes from? Especially the onsite installed version? It's in support of the users.

Absolutely agree with that, this is the reason why we prefer unlimited licenses. I work at research facility and every year we have thousands of newcomers who stay here for several months and then leave, we simply cannot take on us management of their accounts.

Fully agree with you. I use a private git repo on my own cloud server (west europe based).

Github make full sense for open source projects, with easy forking and pull requests. However, I dont see any advantage to take a private repo, even worst at the price they propose, and hosted in a complex legal context.

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